Cheques (e.g., checks) are a type of bill of exchange. Cheques were developed as a way to make payments without carrying large amounts of money physically. A cheque is a negotiable instrument instructing a financial institution to pay a specific amount of a specific currency from a specified transactional account held in a drawer's name with the financial institution.
Although forms of cheques have been in use since ancient times and at least since the 9th century, it was during the 20th century that cheques became a highly popular non-cash method for making payments and the usage of cheques peaked. By second half of the 20th century, as cheque processing became automated, billions of cheques were issued annually. These volumes peaked in or around the early 1990s.
As the volume of cheques increased, several financial institutions may outsource cheque processing activity to third party companies. The third party companies may process millions of cheques per day using dedicated cheque scanners specially designed for producing cheque images from a physical hard copy cheque. The digital cheque copies are processed using available softwares. A Camera Image File Format (CIFF) and an X9 format are some of the financial industry standards for encoding and storing cheque images.
Sensitive information in cheque images may not be disclosed to third party for processing such as Quality Assessment (QA) and testing. One of the solutions the financial institution follow is, creating dummy cheques for processing. Another solution is to mask sensitive information in the cheque images.
Randomly masking sensitive information of the cheque images with non-realistic fields and/or overlaying blank image on the sensitive information may not have effective results in the Quality Assessment (QA) process. Further, masking all fields of cheque image may not be necessary in all situations.